URAP

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Interpreting deep networks is essential for applying them to scientific applications such as healthcare. Two prominent approaches to interpret neural networks are saliency methods and network compression. However, both methods...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

Characterizing the the neural function in the brain and its relationship with connectivity is an eminent question of visual sensory processing. With the recent increase in the amount of the data collected from brain, tools based on machine learning principles play an essential role in understanding the brain function. The...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

Computational tools based on machine learning principles have shown promising results in analyzing medical images. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are one of the most successful tools in this domain. While most of the algorithms based on CNNs are supervised and with the increasing amount of un-labeled datasets, it...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

There is an immense amount of unstructured and uncollated data in neuroscience and bioinformatics that could be used to guide knowledge discovery. Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in extracting and analyzing unstructured natural language corpora and are promising for semi-automated processing of text into scientific knowledge such...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Conformal prediction (CP) is a model-agnostic and distribution-free method for quantifying uncertainty in black-box machine learning (ML) models. CP can be used to construct prediction sets/intervals that covers the true labels with a pre-determined probability as long as the training and testing data are exchangeable...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Vision-Language Models (VLM) can support clinicians by analyzing medical images and engaging in natural language interactions to assist in diagnostic and treatment tasks. However, VLMs often exhibit "hallucinogenic" behavior, generating textual outputs not grounded in contextual multimodal information. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the medical domain, where we...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on large corpora of text have demonstrated incredible capabilities across with zero- or few-shot performance in new tasks that differ from their pre-training objectives. In this projects, we will study the zero-shot performance of LLMs for various clinical tasks using real...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Institutional constraints and concerns over patient privacy impedes sharing of clinical data among researchers. High-fidelity synthetic data that mimics the real data distribution without revealing real data for individual patients can help empower and democratize research applying machine learning models to clinical problems. In this project, we will use...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Methods in computer vision have reached a level of maturity that we can now develop computational instruments to measure a wide range of phenomena in film -- which actors are present in frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door to...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

LitBank an annotated dataset of fiction to support tasks in natural language processing and the computational humanities. While it currently exists for English, we'll be branching out to create similar resources for other languages as well (including Spanish, Japanese, German and other languages). The primary research will involve carrying out...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This URAP position is a placeholder for mentorship of a project of your design. If you are an advanced student in CS, data science, or another discipline with a strong computational background and have a topic of interest in the space of cultural analytics or computational social science, feel free...

Gasper Begus - Professor, Linguistics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This project looks at language in deep neural networks, LLMs, animals (whales, elephants, spiders), and humans. We model spoken language from raw audio using deep generative neural networks (GANs). We use audio, neural, and behavioral data in spoken language to better understand and interpret deep learning models...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary approach to discuss, curate...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Psychiatric disorders including PTSD; and alcohol use disorder and other addictions are responsible for a large portion of both the global burden and US burden of disease. Current therapies help some people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the side-effects accompanying...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

In 2022, there were an estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV and 31,800 new HIV infections in the United States. The U.S. HIV epidemic disproportionately affects men who have sex with men and is defined by persistent racial/ethnic disparities. We have two ongoing projects evaluating access to HIV...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Become familiar with the mathematical, statistical, and computational tools used in the group and learn how to apply these methods to answer questions in ecological research and conservation decision making. Emphasis on the use of deep reinforcement learning and best practices in data science software development...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Develop, test, and visualize methods for forecasting ecological variables such as carbon flux, beetle abundance, or indicators of aquatic ecosystem health...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Arid ecosystems such as the Mojave Desert are undergoing rapid shifts in climate and fire activity, with major implications for ecological resilience and species conservation. The Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE) is currently collaborating with the National Park Service to develop ecological models that simulate vegetation response...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Guns and power go together. Like today, most forms of inequality in the global 19th century depended on a weapons gap. The unequal distribution of firearms helped determine power relations both between countries and within countries. Where did all those guns come from? And why did some have so many...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Are you interested in history? Intrigued by the secrets locked away in old, handwritten letters? Do you want to help create new knowledge about the past through archival research? Or put technical skills to work understanding the past? If so, here’s your chance. Brian DeLay (Professor of History) and Julia...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

None of the revolutionaries who transformed the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could mass-produce their own guns and ammunition. They had to rely on the international arms trade. Aim at Empire is the first book to explore how access to weapons (or lack thereof) shaped...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This is an opportunity to work on technical projects involving ML/AI. The projects include: (i) working with a large dataset of over 400 million employment profiles (resumes) in order to understand global employment dynamics and firm performance by structuring and analyze the large textual data; (ii) building custom large...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project supports Professor Anastassia Fedyk’s research and policy work with web development and graphic design. The project involves maintaining and improving policy-related web resources such as Econ4UA.org, as well as designing and running experimental RCTs and surveys (sometimes involving new websites, sometimes executing simple Qualtrics surveys). Finally, the...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project assists in Professor Fedyk's more practical research, including not only her research papers but also frequent media interviews and the op-eds she writes for outlets such as Washington Post and LA Times. Example topics covered in this project include: Macroeconomic policies in the US and abroad; Measuring...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project focuses on data: hand-collecting new data, improving existing data, and structuring large messy data. Today, very large data sets are often at the heart of many social science research questions. However, those data sets can be plagued by big data problems: missing data, bad data, duplicate data...

Dennis Feehan - Professor, Demography

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Big historical datasets have set off an exciting wave of discoveries throughout the social sciences. These datasets have hundreds of millions of rows with rich information about historical populations, such as the complete set of responses to the 1940 US census and the record of all Social Security enrollments. They...

Heather Haveman - Professor, Sociology, Sociology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

I am analyzing a longitudinal database of articles published in the Washington Post newspaper from 1977 to 2024. The primary goal is to understand how gender roles are portrayed in news media. To do this, we are using several natural-language-processing techniques. We are building a dictionary of gender...

Julian Hong - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The Hong lab is part of the UCSF Department of Radiation Oncology and Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. We focus on combining clinical domain knowledge with data science to generate insights from real world data, develop actionable computational tools, and evaluate the benefit of these advances for personalized cancer care...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

We explore how motivated and cognitive biases lead people to support inequality, even when it's not in their best interest to do so...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

For this lab study, we are examining moral decision-making within group contexts. Specifically, we are exploring how moral decisions are discussed and made in groups...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Some topics under investigation: - Do perceptions of hiring criterion vary based on preference to maintain the status quo? - Exploring the pitfalls of the hiring process and attempts to increase diversity - Why do supervisors assign more diversity related tasks to racial minority and woman employees? What psychological cost does this have...

Yehuda Kalay - Professor, Architecture

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The performance of healthcare facilities is an important issue due to the high value of the services they provide on one hand, and the high cost of constructing and operating them on the other. Various disciplines have offered measures to assess such performance, focusing on different indicators. The healthcare industry...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet. The information contained in museums include observational and specimen-based data, text, images, sound and video and form the foundation of what we know...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) is a vibrant research and informatics center for the campus and the natural history communities around the world. The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species, using the type III secretion system to secrete and translocate effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to function primarily in the suppression of host defense signaling. However recognition of...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species. Virulence is primarily achieved by the type III secretion system, which secretes and translocates effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to suppress host defense signaling. However recognition of these...

Rita Lucarelli - Professor, MELC (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures)

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Ancient Egyptian coffins are inscribed with spells and images which stand in for spells. All function together as a machine to resurrect the deceased and to guide them safely through the next world. Given this function, it is perhaps surprising that the texts from coffins are usually published completely divorced...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

There are a limited number of human omics datasets that include menopausal status information for female subjects and include enough premenopausal and postmenopausal women. For instance, multi-omics data has been generated for thousands of Framingham Heart Study (FHS) participants and hundreds of TwinsUK female twin pairs. We will compare...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

A subset of women experience an accelerated rise in certain cardiometabolic risk factors around the time of menopause, increasing their risk for heart disease and other conditions. We would like to discover why some women experience dramatic changes while others are relatively protected...

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

This is an ongoing project which examines the effects of market structure on the market for consumer data. The project uses a variety of data sources, including many through the UCB library. If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of empirical research at the intersection of marketing, economics...

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

This URAP project exposes students to one or more of the ongoing projects in quantitative marketing and industrial organization, including topics on product variety, pricing, and consumer demand. Examples of ongoing projects include work on optimal platform product variety, product bundling in video game markets, and consumer search and information...

Laurie Pearce - Lecturer, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Are you interested in ancient civilizations and modern technologies? Would you like to contribute to the preservation of knowledge and cultural heritage? Do you have or would you like to develop skills with databases and image preparation tools? Research apprentices associated with the URAP project Ancient Texts, Modern...

Fernando Perez - Professor, Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

GeoJupyter is an open community which aims to enable more people to confidently engage with geospatial data through open source tools. Our flagship project is JupyterGIS, a Geospatial Information System (GIS) environment native to the browser and implemented as a JupyterLab extension. You will contribute to this project by writing...

Christine Philliou - Professor, History

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This is a collaborative research and Digital Humanities project I initiated in 2020 and our team includes scholars in Greece, Turkey, and several other countries. We are reading Ottoman Turkish and Greek sources about the population of Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and creating data sets, and then visualizations and interactive...

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC) Co-pilot project is an innovative research initiative aimed at revolutionizing the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases (NDD), such as Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia, through the integration of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). This project is particularly significant due to the high prevalence...

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     

Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are neurodegenerative diseases with numbers rapidly increasing and currently no cure. To accurately identify the earliest signs of clinical dementia, there is a critical need for sensitive, low-cost, and high-access cognitive markers in the preclinical phase. Novel cognitive markers can complement biomarker information...

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     

Semantic dementia (SD) presents as a unique neurodegenerative disorder with focal atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs). It is comprised of a primarily left-lateralized language syndrome and a right-lateralized behavioral disorder. One current challenge in this disease is in accurately identifying the distant brain regions that are...

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Earth rotation was an evolutionary pressure for organisms to evolve circadian rhythms in order to be able to anticipate the rhythmic day/night cycles. These circadian clocks regulate physiological properties such as sleep, immune response and metabolism. Our lab studies circadian clocks in parasites. This project focus on performing bioinformatics...

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     

Parasitic diseases cause major health burden worldwide, with over 1 million deaths each year. Despite having the genome of many parasites sequenced, almost half of their genes are of unknown function. There are still major gaps in our understanding of host-parasite interactions and disease transmission by vectors. Our research...